Scientia Pro Publica 23: Psychology

Beginning | Biology | Conservation | Ethics | Medicine | Physics | Psychology | Conclusion




Prosopagnosia is the condition of not being able to recognize faces. Grant Jacobs presents a paper on The inheritance of face recognition (should you blame your parents if you can’t recognise faces?) ^{Journal article}

Jeremy Wilmer and his colleagues estimated the heritability of face recognition to be 0.7, quite strongly genetic. This indicates that genetics would explain 70% of the effects that determine a person’s ability to recognise faces.

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There appears to be some debate if face recognition is a distributed process, involving different parts of the brain, or one involving a centre within the brain devoted to face recognition. This study supports the latter view.

Andrew Bernardin espouses the view that reporting on scientific experiments that did not show interesting, positive results is also important. When the (often less intriguing) null hypothesis cannot be ruled out, that, too, is worthy of being shared. He gives examples of Two Noteworthy Null Results in Psychology and Gender Differences:

IU study finds no consensus in definitions of ‘had sex’

A new study from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University found that no uniform consensus existed when a representative sample of 18- to 96-year-olds was asked what the term meant to them.

People who have deep conversations with others are happier, research has shown. It may be that the conversations are the causal factor, but there are other alternative explanation, as Andrew Bernardin recounts in Talk and Well-Being: A Correlation to Question. ^{Journal article}

The research findings include two noteworthy results.

1) Greater well-being was related to spending less time alone and more time talking to others: The happiest participants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talking than the unhappiest participants. [bold mine]

“Related to” = there was a correlation. Causal?

2) The happiest participants had twice as many substantive conversations and one third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants.

Elizabeth Moritz categorizes lab-workers into types based on what kind of golves their wear in the lab: What your gloves say about you. I don't wear any, but there's no such type!